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== Intro ==

This community is super thoughtful and I've avidly read your posts for years; you set a high bar for insight and achievement in thinking about information, skillsharing, and service.

For a few years I've helped run internship programs that bring new people into the community of practice that is open source, and I've done my share of mentorship, and I also want to talk with people about that this week, but not right now.

And [http://jobs.wikimedia.org/ we're hiring].

Now, you in this room are the experts on your pieces of software that you work on. And most of you already know if the user experience of that software isn't what you want it to be. So I want to give you some thoughts and some examples from other communities and products, about what good and bad user experience can do, and then talk about why we technologists usually don't put enough investment into user experience, and what we can do to fix that.

Earlier this month there was a conversation on MetaFilter about coffee machines, especially about those pod machines, Keurigs. And one person said, "This convenience thing is a bit overstated." And librarian Jessamyn West had a really interesting response, which I'd like to quote. She said:

== Examples ==

But Lisa J. Servon, an urban policy professor at The New School, worked in a RiteCheck for four months and found that one reason people chose RiteCheck over a traditional bank was the user experience, the hospitality people got. She wrote in The Atlantic:

Professor Servon believes that to attract these depositors, banks would need a better product -- fee and service structures that work for them.

So given that New York Public Library lent out about 250,000 print books every week last year, you might hope that NYPL would be lending out, let's say, 150,000, or maybe even just a hundred thousand or fifty thousand ebooks per week. But the number is actually way lower than that: 19,000. So instead of a 3-to-2 or a 3-to-1 ratio it's more like a 13-to-1 ratio.

The reason I know about this is that New York Public Library has this division, NYPL Labs, which you might have heard of. And they have broken down the ebook borrowing experience and found that it currently takes eighteen separate steps for an NYPL user to borrow an ebook. So this spring they're starting a two-year project to take that down to three steps. That's their goal. And I would predict that this would raise ebook borrowing rates beyond this freaking 13:1 print-to-ebook ratio.

And we've found that sometimes little things make a big difference. Like, for a subsection of an article, the "edit" link used to be all the way at the right side of the screen. So it wasn't obvious what it was for, and in fact some users thought it was the way you edited the previous section. When we moved that link to be right next to the subsection's headline, we got a much higher clickthrough rate, consistently -- the rate more than doubled. It went up by 117 percent. And that higher volume of clicks led to 8.6 percent more edits as well. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Section_edit_modification#Overview_analysis_from_previous_test https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Change_to_section_edit_links

One last note about Wikipedia and usability: you don't have to register to read Wikipedia. It's just there, no paywall, no regwall. And there are a lot of really great open educational resources out there, OERs, that have content that readers would really find useful -- except it's behind a registration wall. And that just massively reduces how many people are going to see it.

So in recent years we've seen some new startups that are usability hacks. Like ZocDoc, a website that lets you see doctors in your area who have open appointment slots this week, and lets you filter out the ones who don't take your insurance, and lets you book the appointment online. And MinuteClinics and other quick clinics at drugstores and big box stores are walk-in, low-cost ways to get quick diagnoses or shots.

And who uses it on a regular basis?

Within LITA, some folks have proposed a Usability Interest Group, so that's also something to look into.

So, you can see that other libraries are doing this. Sometimes we call it UI, or Human-Computer Interface, or user-centered design, or interaction design, and it intersects with product management, but it all goes to what I've been talking about. Several people on the Code4Lib list in October talked about what a huge difference a dedicated UX person or team makes. For example, Tom Cramer said, "We have been lucky to have a full time interaction designer within our library IT group for about 6 years. It makes a world of difference in the quality of our products." https://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1310&L=CODE4LIB&F=&S=&P=243880

Better user experience is the best force multiplier we have at our command, so it's vital that we make it a first-class priority, throughout the development process. And with disciplined empathy we can do that - here at the intersection of libraries and tech, we can figure out how to scale hospitality, fix the new last mile problem, and actually achieve the social justice goals that so many of us got into this for.

- [http://www.harihareswara.net/ Sumana Harihareswara], Mar 25, 2014

* http://bakinglibrarian.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/code4lib-day-1/

* [https://twitter.com/BarnardArchives/status/448884704742498304 @BarnardArchives] If you haven't yet read @brainwane's #c4l14 keynote you really should http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2014_Keynote_by_Sumana_Harihareswara … 1/2

* [https://twitter.com/BarnardArchives/status/448885009836171264 @BarnardArchives] "Seeing that causation, seeing the connection between what someone's doing now & all the causation that went before it, is empathy."WOAH 2/2

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